Quote

The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.

Clive James

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Clive James
Age: 80 †
Born: 1939
Born: October 7
Died: 2019
Died: November 24
Author
Broadcaster
Literary Critic
Poet
Television Presenter
Writer
Kogarah
New South Wales
Australia
Clive Vivian Leopold James
Clive Vivian James
World
Public
Clock
Around
Towns
Impossibly
Part
London
Booth
America
Seemed
Guarded
Look
Clean
Telephone
Looks
Streets
Telephones
Would
Modern
Comparison
Like
Least
Town

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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
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If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
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When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James